The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Dark Lady of the Sonnets by George Bernard Shaw: parts, such as Troilus and Cressida, All's Well That Ends Well, and
Measure for Measure, have dropped on our stage as dead as the second
part of Goethe's Faust or Ibsen's Emperor or Galilean.
Here, then, Shakespear had a real grievance; and though it is a
sentimental exaggeration to describe him as a broken-hearted man in
the face of the passages of reckless jollity and serenely happy poetry
in his latest plays, yet the discovery that his most serious work
could reach success only when carried on the back of a very
fascinating actor who was enormously overcharging his part, and that
the serious plays which did not contain parts big enough to hold the
overcharge were left on the shelf, amply accounts for the evident fact
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane: worriment. The little blistering voices of pain
that had called out from his scalp were, he
thought, definite in their expression of danger.
By them he believed that he could measure his
plight. But when they remained ominously
silent he became frightened and imagined ter-
rible fingers that clutched into his brain.
Amid it he began to reflect upon various
incidents and conditions of the past. He be-
thought him of certain meals his mother had
cooked at home, in which those dishes of which
 The Red Badge of Courage |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Odyssey by Homer: kept, and where was also his bow, and the quiver full of deadly
arrows that had been given him by a friend whom he had met in
Lacedaemon--Iphitus the son of Eurytus. The two fell in with one
another in Messene at the house of Ortilochus, where Ulysses was
staying in order to recover a debt that was owing from the whole
people; for the Messenians had carried off three hundred sheep
from Ithaca, and had sailed away with them and with their
shepherds. In quest of these Ulysses took a long journey while
still quite young, for his father and the other chieftains sent
him on a mission to recover them. Iphitus had gone there also to
try and get back twelve brood mares that he had lost, and the
 The Odyssey |